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The R300 GLSL Compiler Improvements Are Coming

06-08-2010, 12:00 PM

Phoronix: The R300 GLSL Compiler Improvements Are Coming

As we talked about back in April, there are five summer X/Mesa projects as part of Google's Summer of Code. One of these projects is to improve the GLSL (GL Shading Language) compiler for the ATI R300 class graphics processors and while the summer has just begun, there is already some work emerging...

Comment

Tom Stellard is the student developer working on the R300 GLSL improvements, which should benefit many include with the ATI Gallium3D stack for this older hardware architecture. Tom wrote to the Mesa development list a few days back to the Mesa development list that he's published a branch of Mesa that now supports loop unrolling for R300 ASICs that don't natively support the unrolling of loops.

Comment

1) Many people are quite upset that r500-class hardware is not supported by Catalyst anymore, and they are complaining about the support. So yeah, they are worried about performance, and are very vocal about it.

2) r600+ already have decent GLSL

3) People hack on the things they want to hack. This is mostly free software developers nowadays, and a Google student in this case. It's quite possible that this particular guy can make a decent job of the GLSL stuff for r300, but couldn't do Evergreen EXA support or hack OpenGL 3+ features into Mesa, or something else.

But yeah, I'm also happy about all the improvements for newer hardware.